Knowledge popularization in a technocratic-populist context, or how the Israeli state shaped media coverage of large-scale urban plans

In this study, we examine recent actions taken by the Israeli state to naturalize technocratic understandings of land-use plans through the mass media, and assess the implications of this for power-knowledge relations between the state, planners and citizens. Our research focuses on the years 2013–2018, when state planners and officials began working with PR agents to promulgate state-generated, pro-growth representations of plans through mainstream media outlets. We focus on coverage of three types of large-scale plans, all of which involve complex and varied knowledge contents: city master plans, new neighborhood plans, and urban renewal plans. Using critical discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews with key planners and journalists, we examined what kinds of knowledge and information about these plans were conveyed, and how. We found that a significant percentage (some 40%) of the articles published during this period were based directly on state-issued press releases, and exclusively conveyed state-sanctioned perspectives. We interpret this as an attempt by the state to highlight its own role in planning and housing, while taking advantage of journalists' lack of planning knowledge and pressure to publish in order to construct ‘citizen-technocrats’ whose knowledge mirrors that of state-affiliated actors. We situate these findings within the emerging academic discourse on “technocratic populism,” a form of governance in which populist regimes communicate technocratic knowledge directly to citizens, and show how mis/disinformation tactics usually associated with populist discourse now appear in planning communications in Israel. This practice, we argue, has served to entrench a shift toward a centralized form of neoliberalism, while promoting illiberal conceptions of state-citizen relations in the planning context.